Casemate 77

Discovering Fortifications - from the Tudors to the Cold War:

Bernard Lowry. PB, 136pp. All colour photos, maps, glossary, gazetteer and bibliography. ISBN 0.7478.0651.9. £10.99. Published by Shire Publications, 2006.

This book has been long awaited. Shire first contacted FSG in 1998, and the matter was filed away. However Bernard, the then Honorary Secretary had obviously not forgotten the letter, and here is the book.

It has lots of colour photographs, many taken at FSG meetings, so one can recognise a few friends here and there, and is divided into nine chapters:

1. Introduction.
2. Henry VIII's Great Castles, and Elizabethan bastions.
3. Civil War.
4. The Restoration, and the work of De Gomme.
5. Jacobite Revolts.
6. War with France, and Pitt's 'Pork Pies'.
7. Palmerston's Follies, and a Defence Scheme for London.
8. World Wars.
9. The Cold War and the nuclear threat.

We even go into Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands with the gazetteer of fortifications open to the public, though not to Alderney, where I recall one simply calls to collect the key for one fort.

Portland, Breakwater Fort. (Bernard Lowry).

This is a well-planned and well-written book that should be in every FSG member's haversack. Bernard is especially good on the defences of WWI and WWII, and the secret places constructed for the Cold War, one of which is in Fife and open to the public. It still has the CO's half-drunk bottle of whisky on his desk, and when I quizzed two of our members at the Fort George conference, they both swore they had not been responsible for it being only half full.

John Kinross.